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Annexed: Mystery Science Theatre

In this edition of Annexed: a mysterious caller, The real Strangler, a science experiment, scales, and good-byes.

Mystery # 1 – Alan:
On Monday, one of the teams (the one that The Strangler and Bob are on) had a conference call. Seems pretty typical in an office right? Well, what wasn’t typical was that some random guy named Alan called in. He announced himself and then came that awkward moment of, “Who is this guy? Is he invited? Should I know who this is?” and frantically searching your brain for the answers. There were none. No one knew who Alan was. So, the call proceeded. Afterwards, after everyone had hung up, the gang came running out and said “Who’s Alan?” Still no one knew. We determined that it was a Conference Call Crasher. You know, people who dial in to random conference calls just to mess with those on the line. What a fun idea! So we decided to try it. On our next departmental meeting, Bob announced himself as Alan. It threw our manager off a bit but then he recognized the voice and said, “Bob, is that you?” We’re going to continue crashing conference calls and pretending we are supposed to be there.

“Hi this is Alan!”

“Alan?….um, this is the XYZ Project meeting. Are you on the right call?”

“Yep, Mike sent me.”

“Oh. Um, what department are you with?”

“[static]I’m with the [static] department”

“Oh, ok….”

The meeting proceeds…Alan interrupts the agenda, “Hey this is Alan. Are we going to talk about the baseline?”

“Well, no, that’s not on the agenda.”

“Well that’s why I dialed in. Here let me just tell you that we need to see some dates soon or we won’t support this project.”

“Oh well um, we’re not quite there yet Alan but I’ll see what I can do. What department are you with again?”

“[static] the [static] department”

“I’m sorry what?”

“Ok this is getting ridiculous. That’s it, I’m hanging up and talking to Mike about this!” [click]

Mystery # 2 – The Strangler:
Ok so you all know that I call my British co-worker “The Strangler”. It started as a funny joke because she can be a hard ass. Well, it’s not so funny anymore. Turns out The Mall has its own Strangler and this person is leaving us morbid notes at our desks!

This was the first item to show up:

In case you can’t tell, it’s a Christmas Card. It’s actually the card that the Brit left for Bob. But, when we came back from lunch one day, Bob returned to his desk to find it like this! How alarming! We all brushed it off as a joke, until this appeared on Bob’s desk the next day…

WTF!? This is no longer funny and we’re all a bit on edge. But, since both items were on Bob’s desk, we all felt solace in the fact that The Strangler (or T.S. ) seemed to have a thing for Bob. Hey, better him than me right? Or so I thought.

This was found on my monitor yesterday…

Are we seeing a pattern here people? Obviously T.S. has a calling card and he’s now aiming his antics at me!

So far nothing has happened today so maybe it was a lark. I’ll keep you posted…

Science #1 – The Experiment
Remember how I told you last Friday that I was going to conduct a very intricate experiment this week? Well here it is. Basically, I laid 3 random objects in various spots around The Mall. The goal was to see how long they would stay before being taken or moved.

Here are the items and their locations:

A quarter: I placed a quarter on the floor, next to one of the planters. It was visible but out-of-the-way enough that it wouldn’t be too obvious.

Post-it Note: I stuck a post-it to the wall next to the cafeteria. It was lower on the wall and somewhat inconspicuous. I wrote “You’ve been Annexed :)” on it.

Candy bar: the last item was a mini, somewhat stale, candy bar. I placed it on the back of a bench.

I laid the items out at about 2:40 p.m. on Monday. My plan was to check on them every day for progress. **NERD ALERT**NERD ALERT** I even made an Excel spreadsheet to track my data! Late afternoon I was hungry for chocolate and almost went back out to snatch my precious little morsal back, but I resisted. I didn’t want to taint the experiment! When I left that night around 5, I could see that the quarter was still there. I didn’t go check on the other items. Tuesday morning I came in and could see that the quarter was gone. Around 9:30 a.m. I went to check on the other items and they were gone too.

Conclusions: Either The Mall has a cleaning crew that removed all the items OR Scooter snagged ’em all up and stowed them away in his bathroom-stall-shrine to me. One of these days I’ll send Bob in to the bathroom to check the stall and verify that last point.

I had to search for the coin slot. What’s that? There are directions and arrows clearly marked on the sign, directing me to said slot? Whatever. If I had followed those directions I wouldn’t have found this:

click to view larger image

What a find! Apparently someone had weighed themselves just minutes before I arrived and forgot to take their printout with them! Suh-weet! Naturally I snagged it and here’s what I gleaned:

The person was 232.6 lbs (or 105.5 kg) but should weigh 158.0 lbs or (71.7 kg). Conclusion – this person is overweight by about 75 pounds!

To keep up that weight, this person needs to continue eating 3489 calories a day. Conclusion – this person eats a lot.

To lose weight, they should eat 2370 calories daily. Conclusion – even if trying to lose weight, this person would still eat a lot!

Now it was time for me to weigh myself. I put my quarter in and stepped on the scale. It greeted me and then asked a series of questions:

Adult or child? (I answered adult. I know this is debatable sometimes with my mental state, but my body is adult sized)

Did I want to also get my lucky lotto numbers? (I said no because it would have cost me another quarter and I only had 2 – one for this scale and one for the other one. This would be a good time to shout out to Bob for loaning me the quarters! Thanks dude!)

My ideal weight is 148.0 lbs (67.1 kg). In case you didn’t bother with the math, that means this thing thinks I’m underweight! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Tell that to my muffin top!

If I want to maintain this weight, I should eat 2100 calories daily. Finally I have permission to pig out!

If I want to *gain* weight, I should eat 2220 calories daily. Not only permission, but encouragement! Thank you Mall Gods!

Then it told me to enjoy my day. Are you kidding? I get to eat 2200 calories! You bet I’m going to enjoy my day!

Next I went to the other scale:

I had saved this one for last because it was the cute one with Bugsy on it. No bonus printout on this one so I put my quarter in, and it promptly ate it and didn’t turn on. The damn thing doesn’t work! I could have used that quarter to get my lucky lotto numbers!!! Stupid bug…

Theatre #1 – Good-byes

One of the Indians left this week. He was the leader of the pack and a royal pain in the butt on many occasions. But overall he was a nice guy and it was kind of sad to say good-bye. It was also the first indication that these projects will not last forever and while I will be happy to migrate back to the west office, a part of me will miss this place. Despite the unpleasantness of the surroundings, our little group has a lot of fun. Someone told me last night that they would love to work here because it looks like we have a blast all day. And we do. But it’s also a lot of hard work. We have to be silly and goofy to get through the other crap. Eases the stress.

Also said goodbye to The Brit today, but this is just temporary. She is heading back home to visit family and friends for the holidays. She’ll be gone for 2 weeks and we’ll miss her terribly. But this also means we can totally dog’s breakfast with her stuff whilst she’s away! [If she’s reading this she literally just had a heart attack because a) I used English slang and b) she’s picturing us touching her things].

Here she is at the airport – making sure she is fully prepared for a trip abroad. She has the basics covered – beer and medication

Before the beer...

After the beer

Theatre #2 – Zombies

So, we often refer to The Mall as the Dawn of the Dead because it’s so. freakin’. empty. We joke about zombies being around. Some zombie skin even showed up on The Brit’s desk the other day (and it touched her spoon. When she discovered this her head exploded and then she got a new spoon). Well, funny thing – yesterday we were eating lunch at John’s and there was a big family at the table next to us (big as in there were a lot of them, not that they’re fat. Although, John’s food could contribute to that too…). One of the gals had 2 kids with her and when they were done eating she told them to go out in the mall and play, which pretty much meant run around screaming. At one point they came in to get a drink and I heard the boy say, “Next time, can I be the zombie?” Beautiful.

And finally, this is what I saw when I walked in to the bathroom after lunch:

Apparently someone didn’t have the $.25 needed and were badly in need of a diaper feminine pad so they broke in and took one. Maybe they should have looked around the mall first. You can sometimes find a quarter or candy bar lying about…